A rousing and provocative political thriller, though the labyrinthine plot can make for an arduous read.
The FBI races to uncover a complex conspiracy to hijack a presidential election.
McCrone’s (Faithless Elector, 2016) second installment in the Imogen Trager series picks up where its predecessor left off: a plot to steal the presidency results in the murders of seven electors, in retribution for their refusal to change their votes, and three faithless electors, who were killed in order to silence them. After a chaotic shootout, the assistant director of the FBI languishes in a medically induced coma; professor Duncan Calder (Trager’s love interest) is badly wounded; and Thomas Kurtz, an FBI agent complicit in the conspiracy, is dead. There is powerful evidence of electoral fraud in Illinois, and it’s likely that when Congress convenes, it will deem the votes of the faithless electors illegitimate. In that case, in accordance with the 12th Amendment, a vote by the House of Representatives will select a new president and one by the Senate, a new vice president, the two possibly from different parties. Both presidential candidates—Republican James Christopher and Democrat Diane Redmond—suggest the other is culpable of fraud, and the public grows violently disillusioned by an increasingly shambolic pantomime of the democratic process. McCrone skillfully depicts a country pushed to the brink: “In this atmosphere, it was growing harder to know what was going on at all, nor what information to trust. The Constitution was straining at the seams.” Trager helps the FBI find evidence of two conspiratorial cells—one operating within the bureau and one outside of it. The acting executive assistant director of the FBI, Don Weir, worries that the agency continues to be infiltrated by moles. The author yet again deftly delivers a combination of stirring action and remarkably intricate plot entanglements. And this is a timely and intelligent commentary on the current state of electoral politics in America—a dour sense of voter disenfranchisement in response to dizzyingly ubiquitous corruption. But the plot is sometimes torpidly complex, and despite dutiful synopses of prior events regularly issued, this will be a difficult book to follow for those who haven’t read the first.
A rousing and provocative political thriller, though the labyrinthine plot can make for an arduous read.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-79784-6
Page Count: 249
Publisher: Faithless Elector
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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